Social Media Platform Feature - Dogether

We are on the lookout to find the next Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. This article is a part of our series where in we feature niche Social Media Platforms, here's a deep dive into Dogether

About the Platform.

Dogether is an interest-based socializing platform for people to plan, meet other like-minded people and do what they love. Be it adventure and travel, sports and games, health and fitness, social and nightlife, learning and developing skills, with Dogether, people can meet interesting strangers, find new company and turn their wish lists into exciting experiences with others.

Launched in November 2016 by Hammad Jilani in Delhi, Dogether facilitates discovering people with similar interests nearby and enables planning fun activities together. Unlike a few social media networks that are confined to connecting, interacting and sharing of information real-time with friends and family members. Dogether enables you to connect with strangers, create events and accomplish your wish lists together.

In this short span of time, the app has collaborated with India’s largest pet festival, Pet Fed and Heartfulness, a global meditation group affiliated with the UN, 91Springboard, Search Party Weekender, and Decathlon. Dogether has clocked around 9 lakh unique app installs on the Google Play store and has registered about 4 lakh users on the app. Over 38% of youngsters in the age bracket between 19 and 22 access Dogether followed by23% in the age group of 23 to 25 and 20% between 26 and 30 years. Cities such as Jaipur, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bengaluruboast of the maximum number ofactive users compared to other urban areas in India.

Dogether has raised $200k in an angel funding round from angel investors in Mumbai. The small team of 11 members (7 in technology, 4 in business development & marketing) is working together to make Dogether the largest activity planning platform in the world. Its mission is to emerge as ago-to destination where itineraries that are big or small, organized or unorganized, P-P or group, planned or impromptu, get featured and planned seamlessly. In the next 6 months, Dogether is targeting massive user engagement and to-do creation with 1.5 million downloads and over 300k activities planned on its platform.

Whom do we cater to?

Our ideal customer is millennials within the age group of 21-32 years who are extroverts, tech savvy, love to socialize and like outdoor activities.

What do we offer to our consumers?

There is a void for consumers in finding likeminded people living nearby. A guitarist when bored would love to jam with other guitarists who are living nearby. And hence, comes our platform which connects people nearby according to their interest.

What motivated us to start up?

The concept of Dogether struck design enthusiast Hammad during his internship days at Ogilvy & Mather in the Middle East. The ad agency that is always buzzing with activities frequently plans small outings or get-togethers with its team members over emails. Hammad found this process time consuming and inefficient as such outings did not witness many attendees. The team members often did not get the information on time and most of the information also got lost on mail. Hammad realised that such inefficiencies exist everywhere when a group of people wants to plan a get-together. That’s when the idea of Dogether was incepted, which caters to activities/events/meet-ups from a person to person perspective.

What's in a name?

The name is itself self-explaining. Since, Hammad was the vision that people must socialize through online medium, plan, meet and do activities. Not just by sitting and chatting on phone. He came with the word: DOGETHER- Doing things together.

How do we see Social Media?

We find social media is a great platform for people to communicate. In fact, it is the most advanced and cheapest mode of communication. The only problem we see is, the user persona behind the screen is different with respect to his real persona. We want people to meet in real life, engage in activities, get amazing experiences to share at the end of it.

Currently we are....

Currently, we are a small team of 10 people and are aiming to grow the team with amazing fresh talents.  Talking about our consumer our most users are from top metros of India.

Our biggest challenge was..

Since this is a completely new concept in India, the biggest challenge we face is we take a lot of time on understanding user behavior and knowingly the user persona. We spend a lot of time on creating a great user experience.

We want to dominate the world by..

We are constantly working hard to make Dogether a more crisp and seamless experience. Some major features in our pipeline are -

a) Payment Gateway - For In-app bookings of activities and experiences.

b) Better User Verification - To filter the user base on our platform through a better verification process.

c) Community-Based Interest Groups - We tend to introduce interest groups of people who are like minded.

We’re making moolah by...

We are planning to integrate a booking feature into the app, where the user would be able to book amazing, niche events handpicked by us.

Our What The **** Moment

Oh my God! There are so many incidents. Every day is a fun day for us. We call our marketing guys as marketing ninjas and tech guys as tech warriors. There is a little giggle and fun all around the workplace every day.

Industry as we foresee

We believe there is going to be cutthroat competition in the space. There is a void when we talk about bringing people to plan an activity online and conduct it offline. Let's see, the one to figure out how to solve that issue will win.

Lastly, are you hiring?

Yes